Transportation

Want to green your job? Stay home

Maybe I shouldn't come to the office anymore. Working from home would treat the planet better, according to the American Electronics Association.

The trade group issued an Earth Day report Tuesday encouraging employers to expand telecommuting, partly to help cut carbon emissions and use of electricity. Among its arguments:

If everyone who could perform a job remotely did so just 1.6 days per week, $4.5 billion worth of fuel would be spared. That would prevent the release of 26 billion pounds of carbon dioxide each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Nearly half of workers commute … Read more

The best fuel cell company you've never seen

I had a chat with Dr. Peter Podessor this week. He is the CEO of Smart Fuel Cells (XETRA: F3C.DE), the best fuel cell company that most Americans have never heard of. Cleantech Blog did an article on the problems with micro fuel cells last year, but we have never written much on the larger size methanol fuel cells that Smart Fuel Cell is developing. SFC is one of the longest running direct methanol fuel cell companies in Europe, but never has made much press in the US, despite the fact that the US is one of their largest … Read more

Think to bring all-electric cars to U.S. next year

Think Global, the Norwegian company making an all-electric town car, has reiterated that it will begin to bring its cars to the U.S. in 2009, and it's providing some more details.

The company makes the Think City, a modified version of an all-electric car originally developed by Ford. It can go 65 miles per hour at top speed and 110 miles on a single charge. Thus, it's not for freeway jockeys--instead, it's targeted at those living in urban cores who take relatively short jaunts and can charge the car up a night. The City will compete … Read more

Companies to watch in green tech: Transportation

With Earth Day upon us, CNET News.com's green reporters sat down and selected five leading companies in five different clean-technology categories. Here are the transportation companies selected:

1. A123 Systems: Like a number of other companies, A123 wants to sell lithium-ion battery packs for electric cars and plug-in hybrids. The difference is that A123, which spun out of MIT, has influential friends. General Motors invested in the company and is testing A123 batteries for its hybrids, including the Chevy Volt expected in 2010. So is Norway's Think, which makes an electric town car. In all, the company … Read more

How to green your life

Want to green your life in honor of Earth Day on Tuesday? Good luck. There's seemingly no limit to the potential catch-22s of trying to do the right thing by the environment.

For example, could so-called green fuel destroy rainforests and drive up food prices? Are organic vegetables shipped from South America really better than those grown conventionally yet closer to home? What if the making of solar panels would pollute a city in China?

Consumers are far removed from the design, mining, manufacture, packaging, and transportation involved in making goods available for daily life, while a complex global … Read more

Tests show BMW's hydrogen car cleans the air

BMW showed off a hydrogen-powered 7-series sedan at the 2008 SAE World Congress in Detroit that actually emits less carbon monoxide than are found in the air around it. This means the engine breaks down or converts the carbon monoxide it takes in. The emissions tests, run by Argonne Laboratories, also show a similar reduction in nonmethane organic gases. The vehicle's other emissions are all so low that standard automobile emissions testing wouldn't have detected them.

This particular demonstration vehicle uses a 6-liter combustion engine that uses hydrogen as fuel, burning it in the cylinders and, according to … Read more

Ousted Tesla exec was behind gas-electric car idea

Here's a fun tidbit that has come out of the Tesla Motors stories this week: ousted founder Martin Eberhard was the exec who first concluded that Tesla needed to turn its Whitestar sedan into a gas-electric hybrid.

It was back in the summer of 2007, said Daryl Siry, vice president of marketing at Tesla. Eberhard examined the technologies, the price of batteries and other factories and "came up with the idea" for making Whitestar a serial hybrid. Serial hybrids are different than existing parallel hybrids like the Toyota Prius. In serial hybrids, the gas engine only charges … Read more

Is ethanol's carbon footprint bad? It depends.

In the cleantech and carbon worlds, the carbon footprint of ethanol, whether from corn or sugar feedstocks and fermentation processes, or enzymatic or thermochemical cellulosic sources, is always good fodder (or perhaps, "fuel") for debate.

And depending on which process and which study you personally ascribe to, the answer on how "carbon clean" ethanol looks depends. In most debates centering on corn fermentation, for example, the studies cite a range from say, 20 to 30% less carbon intensive than gasoline, to 20 or 30% more. This begs one very big question in my mind, what's … Read more

Transmission supplier sues Tesla

Tesla Motors is an innovator in electric cars--and it's got a lot of lawsuits, too.

Earth2Tech has dug up a lawsuit filed by Magna on February 22, 2008 that alleges that the car company failed to pay Magna for transmission work it accomplished. The suit, filed in the Superior Court of San Mateo County, seeks $5.6 million in damages.

This should be an interesting one to watch. Magna no doubt will try to bring a lot of details to light behind the delays that Tesla faced in bringing its Tesla Roadster to market. Tesla, for its part, will … Read more

At Eco-marathon, teen driving team races to 2,843 mpg

Correction, 2:50 PM PDT: Due to incorrect information provided by the company, this post misstated the name of one of the fuels used in the Eco-marathon. The entry from Schurr High School ran off liquified petroleum gas (LPG).

The team from Mater Dei High School might be only months (or less) removed from driver's ed, but it pulled off a nifty feat of driving over the weekend. One of its entries in the Shell Eco-marathon Americas won the grand prize for motoring to a record 2,843.4 miles per gallon.

Its other entry proved none too shabby … Read more